49 Sheds

SOME seem to sigh under the burden of hard work while others, slumped or propped up perilously by shattered walls, turn their own humble existence into a kind of architectural miracle.

Verging on decrepitude - just a few are upright - the sheds Melbourne architect Ross Brewin has photographed in his 49 Sheds exhibition at the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery seem to embody a sense of humour, too.

An entirely weather-beaten structure might have just one strip of new panelling attached, the slightest of concessions by its builder to the long-term effects of rust or wind.

Green shrubbery bubbling out from underneath one corrugated iron roof is a portly approximation of man versus nature, the bulbous fecundity of the landscape barely contained within the timber-slatted walls.

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It's this sense of personality, and the apparent no-nonsense practicality of the sheds' owners (most of whom he has never met - his interest is the structure, not the person), that has for years kept Brewin interested in documenting sheds across Australia. ''Initially it was always just a kind of curiosity and I guess maybe to begin with there was this kind of nostalgia for the country,'' he said.

''But slowly through collecting them I realised I was getting more interested in the shapes and forms and the materiality and the odd colours and the quirks of these objects that sit in the landscape.''

Forty-nine was an arbitrary number: he could have included dozens more if he had the gallery space, taken from the hundreds of shed photographs that are stored on his computer, from the dusty red plains of Western Australia to the hills of Tasmania's Huon Valley.

''I like the idea that it's not a perfect 50, that it's slightly off as a lot of these buildings are themselves slightly off,'' Brewin said. The images are all snapped the same way - the shed sits at the centre of the photograph, sky and land framing it.

Brewin's work is deliberately not in that vein and, using a simple five-megapixel camera, he harbours no illusions about their artistic qualities.

Instead his interest is in the materials, largely corrugated iron and wood, and the almost accidental artistry of each shed's construction. Replacement corrugated panels create an abstract patchwork for some, while in other noticeably older sheds faded timber weatherboard is neatly nailed together in an exercise that would almost certainly not be repeated in this Bunnings era of prefabrication.

It's an aesthetic that has seeped into his own practice, both as an architect and lecturer at Monash University. An ''outback shed'' extension he created for Mossenson Gallery in Collingwood echoes the same multicoloured corrugated panelling seen on his travels, while the inspired thriftiness of older sheds - often made with scrap metal and, in the case of Tasmanian sheds, Huon pine - is a principle he tries to encourage in first-year architecture students to absorb.

Brewin said he had been influenced by ''careful observation of humble things'' before, namely in a friend's commission for a house in a beachside area south of Fremantle, which references the beach shacks Brewin and his mate remembered as kids, and which stands apart from the glass and concrete mansions that occupy much of the area now.

But the sheds exhibition hosts no such sentimentality or narrative - the images are too matter-of-fact for that.

''People can look at the exhibition and they can look at them for their object-like qualities in the same way that I might do or they can start to get nostalgic about the country,'' Brewin said. ''Lots of people come at it from different places and I think that's good.''

49 Sheds is at the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery until April 21.